This YouMoz entry was submitted by one of our community members. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

As part of my career in internet marketing primarily focused on SEO, I have had the opportunity to interact with several small and mid-size firm owners and marketing managers. Most of the time I have seen that the customers know to a certain extent as to why they need SEO (even though it is mostly restricted to rankings on search engines) but what they do not know is how SEO actually works.

SEO is fiercely competitive field with lot of firms (good and bad) battling it out. In a situation like this it is highly important that customers understand SEO, know what realistic goals are.

My approach is always to ensure that customers understand the nitty-gritty’s of search engine optimization (at least even at a very basic level) when they talk to us. This helps them appreciate the work which goes behind a successful SEO campaign and allows them to make a better judgment when it comes choosing an SEO agency.

There are mainly four types of customers in this world:

1. Ones who know a lot about SEO

2. Ones who think they know a lot

3. Ones who do not know but are interested and willing to listen to what you have to say

4. Ones who are not willing to listen and understand

It is extremely easy to talk to Type 1 customers as they understand SEO well and are looking for specific things in a vendor to whom they can hand over the SEO work.

Type 2 customers are the most difficult ones as most of the time they tend to portray that they know a lot about SEO. These projects are difficult to convert and even when you convert, it is difficult to manage these. Be ready for some tough times and hope they mend their ways when they see the value in your work.

You can easily work with Type 3 clients and make them understand SEO. You can explain to them why you are proposing something and how will it work. They ask relevant questions and in the end are satisfied with the answers.

On the other hand Type 4 clients are difficult to get to as they are either very busy or feel it is something they do not want to know. It becomes difficult to make them realize the value of your work. The end result is that these clients often make their decisions based on price factor, or false promises made to them by some SEO vendors, who promise the Sun, Moon and Stars to them.

Would love to know about your experiences with customers? Any interesting case you would like to share?

About vsah —
Vikas Sah is the founder and director of Zitz Solutions - a smart internet marketing company which specializes in SEO and SEM. Learn more about Zitz at http://www.zitzsolutions.com/. Connect with Vikas Sah on twitter: http://twitter.com/vikassah

Get fresh SEO data, insights, and tracking

Comments
40

I'd add a fifth category -- clients who don't know and don't really want to know, but realise what you are doing is important and are more than happy to leave you alone and get on with it. Type 1 is obviously the easiest with which to work, but I like this fifth category a lot too!

The problem with these guys is they look at only the outcome (rankings, traffic etc.) and if you suffer on those due to some major search engine algrithm changes then most likely they will call it quits.

I agree that it's difficult to work with clients who can't get past rankings and traffic. This is probably a big reason as to why there are so many bad SEO's - they can make customers happy by getting irrelevant traffic or sketchy short-term methods. Education is deinitely critical.

Another good example is when you give solid recommendations, like creating content or restructuring URL's, but a client doesn't want to take the time or spend the money to do so. This is why I like to educate clients beforehand, so they understand what it takes to be successful.

On the other hand, if we want to go deeper into the classification, I'd suggest to consider the age factor too.

Becuase the youngest, as they are used to personally have - for instance - an account in Facebook or Twitter - can be easily educated (and they want to be better educated) about the coop between "traditional" SEO and Social Marketing for instance.

On the other hand, many of the older marketing VPs are mentally tougher (is this word correct? I mean: harder) to educate about the importance of having a website that is "cool" for the search engine as well for the users. These are usually the ones that still thinks about a website as an online carbon copy of their printed catalog or demo-videos.

Great post - completely agree with your characterisations of clients, I've come across all of them and love the 1s and 3s, dread the 2s and 4s! I love my clients who are always asking questions, willing to learn and who will take a recommendation or idea and just run with it. I really dont love clients who say "thats your job" when you suggest things for them to do.

For me its undeniable that if you teach your clients the principles of SEO and encourage them to actively do things, whether its blogging, writing copy, identifying relationships that could generate links, etc - you are absolutely going to get better results. Yet I think many SEOs still have the attitude of "this is my secret, I'm not giving anything away", they make out to their client that they are sprinkling some mysterious fairy dust on their sites and the results, and particularly the longevity of the campaign (ie continuous improvement) will not be as good.

SEO is not about knowledge of techniques that need to be kept secret. It's about being able to intelligently apply those techniques in particular cases and for particular sites.

I totally agree with you jaamit. Even if you have specific techniques, clients generally (unless they have specific problems they want addressed) are not looking at specifics, they are happy with your overall approach and understanding

I also try to make my clients understand from the start that SEO work is a partnership and won't truly succeed unless they implement my suggestions (or at least discuss them open-mindedly). Without that, I can only do so much.

I am a customer of SEO. I have had an SEO agency working on my site for over 1.5 yrs. I think I have learned a lot during this time becasue I listed, asked a lot of questions, and pretty much followed every SEO recommendation. I am not sure what category to put myself into, but I know that I don't know everything. The only thing I am sure of is that SEO works and my business needs it.

Here is where I need some help from you guys, please. I feel that I have outgrown the capacity and capabilities of my current SEO. But when I started researching a new SEO agency, I discovered a sea of canned providers that are more interested in my budget than trying to understand where I have been and where I am trying to go. The typical conversation goes somthing like this: "our minimum engagement is $3000/mo for a min of 12 months." When I say "fine, what sort of ROI can I expect on this investment?" the converation deteriorates to a canned pitch about how great they are and what great results they have acheived for cutomer X and Y, etc.

I seem to know enough about SEO to get past the sales guys pretty quickly and usually end up talking with someone claiming to be a technical person. They also first try to gage me with price. But this time instead of asking about ROI I bring up the concept of perfornace objectives, targets, metrics, and being held accountable for them. I even stress that I would like the SEO (not me) to establish the perfornace objectives, targets, and metrics. This concept seems to be alien to the SEOs that I have spoken with thus far.

Can anyone please help me with my search for a credible SEO agency that understands what performance metrics and objectives are and is willing to be held accountable for them. If I am missing somthing or being unreasonable, I would really appreciate understanding why and what I can do better.

Interesting point. I agree completely that a client and their SEO should be able to come up with appropriate targets and metrics between them (although I don't think it's really appropriate for an SEO to create these by themselves, as it's the client's business after all).

However, as an SEO, I can fully understand reluctance to set targets to which you're going to be held accountable. In a more general sense, I think targets are much more useful for all parties when used for measuring performance, rather than something set in stone and which 'have' to be met. in the realm of SEO specifically, these 'hard' targets are even more dangerous, as it is ultimately Google (and the other engines) that is the final arbiter of where your site ends up in their rankings. The goal posts are always changing, there's a lot of manual review and moderation, etc. As an SEO, to say that a client's site will definitely end up in ranking X by time Y is foolhardy at best.You only have influence over the search engines, not direct control. Estimates, goals towards which to work, fine, but hard targets are very dangerous.

For example, I have a new client at the moment who was asking me for targets. He's in a very competitive space in which I have not previously worked, and so I honestly have no real idea how long it will take to get to the top of those rankings. There's no way I could have. I can give him a reasonable estimate based on my past experience, but setting a hard target against which I'd be held accountable would be extremely irresponsible for me, my team and for the client.

I completely understand the concerns you describe. I would be equally reluctant to set hard targets if I was a SEO. I also understand that SEO is a process, not an event. Consequently, its effectiveness must be gauged over time. This is why I committed to my current SEO for 1.5 yrs and why I do not have a problem committing to a long-tern strategy. This is also why I suggest soft targets that are measured over time. Examples include: range for KW market share, range for KW market share growth rate, quarterly traffic growth rate, etc. These metrics would gage SEO performance & effectiveness from the search engine perspective. For website optimization harder and more established metrics may be in order, e.g. bounce rate, conversion rate, page views, etc.

I do some statistical methods consulting and can develop a basic control chart that can track this data on an ongoing basis. It would be a simple matter for an experienced SEO to set control limits to gage when a certain SEO strategy is working or when a site needs more attention/effort. It would even give real-time indication of when a search engine algorithm has changed. I have asked some SEO if they had any one in the organization with statistical or math background. No luck so far.

If you want an SEO agency to set goals and objectives and to give you more concrete answers you should have them sign an NDA and open up your internal data to them so they can assess the capacity for growth and ROI.

Interesting point, JG. Frankly, I didn't know not to open up my data. I have made any information an SEO needs available to them. No one has asked me for anything too deep yet, not that there is anything deep. Would you please give me an idea of the kind of information you would like to see in order to "assess capacity for growth and ROI"?

BTW - When I say ROI, I do not necessary mean a dollar return. It would be great to find a SEO that can get that deep, but I feel it may be unreasonable for me to expect this. Ultimately my firm and I have to close the deal. I think the best a SEO can do is drive a high volume of qualified prospects to my firm that we then must then close. An SEO should not be held accountable for my sales ability, or lack there of. So I would measure ROI in terms of the volume and quality of prospects that my firm gets a chance to close, thanks to SEO.

Given my definition of ROI, what sort of info can I give a perspective SEO to allow them to respond to my ROI question?

Always be careful about what data you make available to third parties. Especially those you don't know and trust.

It all depends on how you measure success internally. I'd say determine whether they need to drive a certain percentage increase in visitors while staying withing 10%(or whatever you feel is fair) of your current conversion rates. There are lots of ways to skin a cat when it comes to determining what success is.

Depending on how closely you want to hold them accountable you will need to open data up such as what leywords drive volume, how much volume, the breadth of keywords, current rankings, and if you have paid search accounts looking at how many impressions are available.

This is very helpful, JG. Thank you. I hope you will allow me to pick your brain just a bit more.

I ultimaterly measure success by how many qualified potential customers (prospects, not leads) actually call or submit an inquiry through the website per month. This is what I want to see an increase in.

Granted, explaining what I mean by a "qualified potential customer" is to an SEO may be a bit hard. But just saying conversion may be too broad because, depending on how you collect conversion data, you may be catching a bunch of BS/spam calls & inquiries. Nevertheless, I have been willing to accept this metric, pending revision once I have more BS/spam stats. In fact, I offered this as a key performance indicator (KPI) early on to my current SEO and to the ones I have been researching since. Unfortunately, no one seems willing to set a goal and be held accountable. This is why I have offered to look at KPIs that provide an indication of effectiveness of the SEO's efforts.

What am I missing or doing wrong?

Regarding opening up my data, here is what I have shared with my curretn SEO and perspective SEOs:

access to my GAnalytics account,

access to my HitsLink account (BTW - better than GA),

access to my Google PPC account,

a comprehensive list of KWs that is organized by root word>medium tail phase>long tail phrase, and

flowchart depicting my company's services and their relation to root & medium tail KWs with links to current pages/content

What else would you suggest I share? Frankly, I don't think I have any other data/info. If you think I should have some other data/info, please let me know what and how I can get it.Thanks

Sounds like you are sharing all the right info. Are you asking them to do performance based compensation or an out-clause based on missing these metrics? You'll likely have a very hard time getting someone to take this on a performance basis, though offering upside if they surpass a goal may be a good approach. I don't think any good SEO would take issue with you having an out-clause if they fail to hit certain metrics (assuming they understand how the metric is determined). Hope that helps.

It does help. I have offered incentives, but no one has been willing to reduce their base fee in light of perfornace incentives. I just don't see how an incentive can be effective if the status quo is being met.

If you know of any SEO agency that I may be able to work with, would you please recommed it?

I myself am amazed at why none of the SEO companies have been able to project growth and set some metrics to monitor the effectiveness of the campaign. But I do see a reason why most did not.

SEO proposals are very client specific and an extremely good SEO proposal can easily take up enormous amount of your time. Without any commitment most agencies would be unwilling to put so much time an effort.

The way you (Quality Junky) would want to approach your SEO engagement is the following:

Send details requirements and have a initial discussion to explain what you desire from your SEO campaign. Share your past experiences, challenges faced, accomplishments, etc. Ask them if they need more info and what kind of info. Then ask the vendor to have a follow-up discussion (not a proposal)

Follow-up discussion should be more on Vendor recommending a solution and justifying why and how they think it will work. This is just to give you an idea of their understanding of your business and if they know SEO well or not.

If you feel you are talking to a knowledgeable company then you can give them a confirmation.

Vendor on its part should spend start on the project doing research and planning and proposing a high level custom SEO plan for your requiremnts. This should show more insight and will probably take up 2-4 weeks (depending on the size of the project)

The proposal/plan above should set certain soft targets to meet (hard ones are difficult with SEO).

Work starts on achieving those targets

Then you monitor those soft targets and work done to see if you are satisfied or not.

Regarding ROI, SEO vendor should be judged on the following three factors:

how well the vendor optimizes the website

volume and quality of traffic driven to the website

helping with conversion (can be restricted to recommendations or full blown conversion optimization work)

I completely understand that SOE must be client specific. In fact, this is what I am seeking. I want an SEO campaign that is custom tailored for my firm/services. Furthermore, I think it needs to be a flexible strategy to allow for course corrections based on trend analysis, incremental outcomes, and algorithm changes. Unfortunately, I keep running into a "cookie-cutter" approach. Everyone does a quickie assessment of my site, checks a few KWs and spits out a proposal.

I am willing to commit to an SEO. As I mention in a previous comment, I understand that SEO is a journey, not an event. I have stressed to each SEO candidate that I am looking for a long-term relationship. I have also stressed that I want the long-term relationship and compensation to be based on achievement of measureable goals.

Regarding your 7 recommendation:

How would you recommend that I structure my requirements? As I admitted in my initial comment, I don't think I know enough about SEO to define my requirements accurately or appropriately. At this point in my SEO journey, I will be happy to talk with an SEO that can spell KPI and has at heard of statistics. Ultimately, what I want is an increase in the number of qualified potential customers (prospects, not leads) that contact my firm every month. I have shared this with every SEO that I have spoken with and provided them with every shred on info/data that I have.

The follow-up discussions to date have revealed that none of the SEOs have a good understanding of my business. My firm and I provide business process and management consulting services. We do not have some canned product that can be purchased directly from our website. At least I have been able to weed out the ones that are not up to speed on the basics of current SOE trends that even I am aware of, thanks in part to this forum.

I am not sure what you mean by giving them a confirmation. Would you please clarify? Short of signing a contract and committing to buy their services, what can I do to impress upon a perspective SEO that I am serious?

If I understand correctly (I am not sure I do), you are suggesting that, at this point, I should have already engaged and SEO and that SEO's first step should be to spend 2-4 weeks developing a custom strategy. If this is correct, then this is something that I have not considered doing because I am not comfortable committing to a long-term relationship without understanding the long-term strategy and agreeing on performance metrics and accountability. I guess I am describing the old "chicken or the egg" problem. What advise would you give here?

What sort of soft targets would you recommend that are not difficult for SEO?

Would I contract he SEO at the point or earlier?

What sort of monitoring frequency and method would you recommend?

I really like the 3 measurement factors you recommend. Would you please suggest some metrics for each? It would also be really helpful if you cold suggest how to collect the data.

Thank you so much again. This has been very helpful.

PS: If you are familliar with any SOE agency that may be able to help me, would you please suggest one.

I can see how you would want to seek reduced prices, especially since you have already been through many of the steps of the SEO process with previous SEO work. Thus, it almost make sense that an SEO sort of pick up from where the prior SEO left off, but of course molding the campaign in their own way.

Unfortunately, the SEO has to take some time to get to know your site/industry because it's new.

I would explain to a potential suitor that you already have much in place, and let them know exactly what type of work you want from them, whether it be a content strategy for link building, reviewing competitor links for link building, reporting, continual keyword research, etc. This may get you a reduced price.

The incentive thing is tricky because an SEO might give you valuable strategy, but competition may be doing the same thing. It could take a long time be in a favorable position in the SERP's for competitive keywords. So, the SEO might look at it as if they are imrpoving your site's optimization, but you can't see that through traffic or conversions for some time.

I guess you just need to be clear about what you want with the agency. Then, maybe compare your metrics to competition and watch your metrics grow instead of always focusing on traffic and conversions.

While cost is important, price reduction is not my objective. I am willing to pay as much and more for the right results. I just want to find an SEO partner that has some vested interest in the success of my site and have better transparency to the SEO's work/efforts. I don't want to have an incentive for the sake of having an incentive.

Would you agree with measuring SEO effectiveness on a quarterly basis or a running/moving average? This in not a rhetorical or antagonistic question, I really want to know.

Knowing what I want from my SEO is my problem. I know enough about SEO to know that I don’t know enough about SEO. I can certainly get past the basic BS like directory submission, title tags, meta tags, checking for bad links, etc., but beyond that I don’t feel comfortable telling the SEO what to do. I am a consultant. If I had a customer tell me what to do and how to do it, then they don’t need me. I want an SEO to design and execute a strategy and be accountable for the outcomes. Perhaps I have this view because this is how I work in my consulting practice. This is also how every business that I have every worked with (except healthcare) works.

As I mentioned on one of my previous comments, traffic and conversion are what I ultimately want, but I am not insisting on using traffic and conversion as the primary metrics for accountability. Finding the right metrics that SEOs are comfortable with and that make credible business sense for customers like me, is one of the primary reason I am asking for help on SEOmoz.

If an SEO sees fierce competition in a particular KW, strategy, etc., then the SEO should bring this to the customer’s attention so that the customer can make an informed decision about continuing to invest in the KW, strategy, etc. or seek an alternate strategy. If the customer then decides on staying the course, then metrics can be adjusted appropriately. Companies do this every day in all aspects of their business (except SEO, it would appear).

Your advice about my needing to be clear with an SEO is right on. This is clearly my weakness. Would you and the other readers of SEOmoz be interested in taking my and my firm on as a case study for how to define SEO requirements and performance metrics? Seems like it may be an interesting and educational exercise.

Nice post, and absolutely true. An educated client is much better to work with then a client who either refuses or "thinks" they know what they are talking about. I've worked with all types and the ones who not only appreciate your work the most but also seem to get the most benefit out of your services are the ones who are educated.

Good stuff. I do SEO inhouse, so I don't have to deal with this too bad. Our owner knows little about SEO, so I guess that's kind of like a client. Fortunately he mostly just goes with what I reccommend.

On the reverse side of the coin, I have a lot of SEOs call offering us their service. Their are many types of them too:

The kind that lies blatantly to you, telling you they have a deal with Google to put you in the organic listings.

The kind that tells you they have several popular keywords that are open they can sell you rankings for.

The kind that tell you their main strategy is to put out lots of newsletters, providing you with plenty of rankings and traffic.

The type that really know what they are doing, and want the same thing as you: a great partnership.

From my experience with SEOs that call me, they are mostly desperate and will do or say anything possible to get your cash.

Maybe its mostly phone callers for SEO that are desperate.

I'd say that it's probably a better idea to go find your own SEO online based on a good reputation.

I'd even say an informed client is just as important. When we have had fewer resources internally we hired SEO consultants who never shared what they were doing or how it was really performing. Needless to say the relationship didn't last long.

I like dealing with the second type of customers the most. The challenge is bigger.

- you don't have to get angry at them

- you don't have to explain 1000 times, again and again.

You just have to ask the right questions. Soon they will realize that they are smarter and smarter. They won't realize that they are looking at the same things from another point of view. They will belive that they discovered new things. After a while, they will come back to you because they felt good, appreciated, understood and so on...

The type which I was trying to refer to by Type 2 are the ones who are egoistic and feel they know all about SEO and what they know is correct. I agree in certain cases you might be able to work out a solution but in most cases it does not work long term.

Well categorised. Couldn't say more. But I am sure, I enjoyed reading them and going back to the days and memories dealing with customers. The fifth category from Cyberpunkdreams was also a good one that added some meaning.

I never set expectations, or if the client insists, I always under-promise on results and hope for the best.

I've seen sites go from page 1 of SERPs to page 32 overnight and still can't figure out why. There's no rhyme or reason to some of the activity with search engines so predicting positive outcomes, at least for me, is a no win situation since I don't control search engine algorithms or what the client does once the site is launched.

BTW, the site that fell 32 pages? The site owner had a stack of proprietary content that he put up on other sites. We finally figured (guessed) it was a duplicate content thing.At least it gave us a direction. After five weeks, the site was back on page 1 of Google SERPs but I sure didn't do anything to see that improvement.

I don't think its wrong to under-promise. It certainly is hard to draw a line in the sand becuase of the large external factors that go into SEO. Ultimately the point of doing an upside or a benchmark is to try to align expectations and incentives. There are other ways to do that and each company (on both sides) need to understand their own needs and find a group that fits those needs. Because one-size doesn't always fit all.

there is a difference between working with educated seo customers and having your brain forceably removed so they can do the tasks inhouse...

with new clients we are not talking about rankings anymore but still have traffic as an element, if you are focused on purely rankings you will get burnt.

you also have to think that not everyone wants a long term relationship with an seo company, as they see it as dependance not a partnership, this is a sad train of thought but comes down to their long term goals.